Veterans, PTSD, and the Love of a Good Dog

If you've ever watched a dog pull a person back from the edge, whether during a crisis, a moment of fear or loneliness, or the resurfacing of a memory, then you understand why they so often appear in stories about veterans. In my book Pit Bulls in Paradise: The Dog Fighter’s Funeral, much of the central focus surrounds John’s volunteer work in animal rescue and his devotion to Mickey and Agnes, his English Mastiffs. That theme grew out of my own experiences as a pet owner and as a volunteer with shelters and rescues throughout my military career.

In 2008, I deployed to Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, in northern Iraq. The weekend before I left, our Dalmatian jumped off the bed, excited to greet us. At the last second, his foot slipped between the mattress and the footboard, stopping him in midair. I watched in horror as all sixty-six pounds of my best friend hung upside down by one leg, his knee bent grotesquely in the wrong direction. The sounds of pain and fear, the raw trauma in his voice, are ones I hope never to hear an animal make again. It felt like watching your child get hit by a car.

Twenty-four hours later, I was flying back to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and then on to Iraq, trying not to think about whether my boy would be okay without me. In the end, he lived to be nearly seventeen years old, virtually unheard of for a dog his size. But that first night, coming home without him and knowing I was deploying before I would see him again - if I would see him again - was unbearable. Our Rhodesian Ridgeback, the companion he’d grown up with, was equally anxious without her mate.

When I arrived in Iraq in May 2008, I hadn’t been in the Middle East since Operation Desert Storm seventeen years earlier. A lot had changed. One of those changes was the presence of mental health professionals tasked with mitigating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Combat Stress teams drove around the base visiting units, often accompanied by a few black Labrador retrievers. When they came to see us, my Soldiers would take a short break to sit with the dogs, pet them, or just be near them. No lectures. No therapy sessions. Just dogs. The effect was immediate and unmistakable. The Soldiers’ response to the presence of a dog was palpable; you could feel their minds steady as they settled beside a companion for the moment.

Years later, as a company commander responsible for 250 young Soldiers at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, I saw something similar. These troops had completed basic training and were now in advanced training, learning to become maintenance professionals for the Army. Entry-level military training is supposed to be stressful, but once they had proven themselves, a little pressure relief created a far better learning environment. On weekends, I would occasionally do barracks walk-throughs. When I did, I often brought Millie and Rusty, my two Redbone Coonhounds, and let them roam freely through the barracks, sauntering in and out of rooms, tails wagging.

Around the same time, I volunteered with Carolina Coonhound Rescue, an outstanding organization based in Charleston, two hours south of Fort Jackson. Occasionally, they would come to us in a large RV with a dozen or more dogs. Soldiers from Bravo Company would pair up, take the dogs on a five-kilometer walk, and then spend an hour afterward simply sitting with them on the lawn in front of the barracks.

I never stopped being moved by the transformation I witnessed - Soldiers who an hour earlier stood erect with squared shoulders loosened, their faces softened, tension melted away. Time with a dog changed them. To say the mental health of both Soldier and dog improved would be an understatement. These young troops, many away from home for the first time, had spent months learning how to kill. In moments like these, they were relearning that it was also good to be human.

We may not have had all the data at the time, but decades of research now support exactly what we saw in the Soldiers: the presence of a calm, friendly dog slows heart rates, drops cortisol levels, and levels out breathing.

Large charities and foundations do a lot of good, but if you look closely, some of their executives are very well paid. When you bring a thirty-pound bag of dog food, blankets, or cleaning supplies to a local rescue, there is no doubt where your donation goes. One hundred percent of it helps the animals. And when you pass a treat through the chain-link fence of a kennel, that dog experiences a moment of love, a moment of hope that life can be better. And so do you.

In every deployment, every barracks hallway, every rescue kennel, I've seen the same truth: dogs are not the only ones needing to be saved—often, they save us right back.